Original Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/1198
Price Guides November 2003: Video Cards and Memory
by Kristopher Kubicki on November 23, 2003 11:59 PM EST- Posted in
- Guides
The last couple weeks have proven necessity for another price guide. With COMDEX announcements, new NVIDIA graphics card introductions and various official and unofficial price cuts, the video card market has changed completely in 3 weeks. As always, remember you can track our prices and weekly deltas via our in house RealTime Price Engine.
The largest obvious news was the introduction of the NVIDIA GeForceFX 5700 and 5950 cards. First impressions of the 5700 Ultra have been fairly favorable. Do not forget to check Anand and Derek’s first impressions of the GPU here. Even though we were promised a debut MSRP of under $200, most vendors are carrying BFG and eVGA variants of the 5700 Ultra for around $210. The 5950 debut essentially put the 5900 Ultra prices into a tailspin. If you really feel the need for a 5900 Ultra, they can now be found for under $400 instead of $500.
As an interesting bit of trivia, the 5700 and 5950 series GPUs are not manufactured on the traditional TSMC process NVIDIA has sworn by in the past. Instead, NVIDIA now relies on the IBM foundry in East Fishkill, New York. For those of you who are playing at home, that is the same Fishkill facility where AMD and IBM co-developed the 65nm foundry process for CPUs (AMD’s Fab 36 in Dresden will probably incorporate some of this technology. Read here for Anand’s detailed tour of the existing Fab 30). Tooling over to a different manufacturer is probably costing NVIDIA a bit of money, especially here in the US. However, the long-term benefits of working with AMD and IBM could be incredible for the US based graphics manufacturer.
We can see the 5600 Ultra video cards have nicely adjusted to make themselves a little more competitive to ATI’s 9600 Pro and XT solutions. Over the last 3 weeks, the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra cards have dropped almost 40% in price due to the introduction of the GeForce FX 5950. Granted, this only places NVIDIA’s high end cards price level they should have debuted at. $400 is still ridiculously too much to pay for a video card. Fortunately, we will probably see a correction in price on the ATI counterparts after this most recent adjustment.
We were very interested in the XFX (Pine) GeForceFX 5900 non-Ultra cards that just began to retail under $200. The 5900 should pack a little more punch than the 5700 Ultra, but you loose two slots due to the oversized heatsink/fan.
We saw real changes in the older Ti4200 and Ti4600 line. NVIDIA threw in the towel on these cards a while ago, but they still pack quite a punch for the price (or at least the former price). Unfortunately, steady price increases due to low supply are forcing the Ti line into oblivion.
ATI is still sitting pretty even after the GeForce FX 5700/5950 introduction. The Radeon 9600 Pro and XT continually won over NVIDIA’s 5700 Ultra for DX9 games in our last shootout. Considering the 9600 XT’s only cost about $200, this is great news. Also, the older 9600 Pro’s are shipping for under $150 as well! Just remember, with the 9600 XT you usually get a coupon for a free Half Life 2; but the 9600 Pro does not. Something to consider if you plan on paying $50 for Half Life 2 anyway.
On slightly unrelated news, we are starting to see ATI’s RS300 chipset show up in mass. ASUS debuted its 9100 IGP motherboard at Computex in Taiwan, but motherboards are just starting to hit the market now. The ASUS P4R800-VM will probably show up in the next couple weeks for $120, certainly not a bad buy for a Unix machine or file server (just remember you will take quite a hit in performance compared to the i865PE alternatives). Interestingly enough, within a month Intel will be reducing the prices on its 865G chipsets probably to compete directly with the ATI IGP line.
Prices deltas on the ATI line are typically more stable than that of NVIDIA’s and this week was just one of many that continued to fall into this pattern. The Radeon 9600 XT line continued its slow creep to $200, and surely by next week we will see prices in the $195 proximity. The incredibly overpriced Radeon 9800XT decided to drop another $20, probably early onset of the NVIDIA GeForceFX 5950 and 5900 price correction. Just remember, you can get an extremely capable Sapphire 9800 Pro for a little over $300 (up from $290). The Radeon 9700 Pro’s are probably a little better deal right now at $250. Our bot is having trouble picking up new sources for the 9700 Pro, and we loose about 2-3 sources per week. These cards are going the way of the 9500 Pro and fast.
DRAM memory prices is slowly back on the downfall again. Analysts believe that the cost of the DRAM manufacturing is outpacing the speed of declines, which means we will see high markups on very cheap RAM. According to our industry sources, the amount of DDR DRAM memory sales decreased to as much as 22% last month. This is a dangerous trend for memory makers who are still keeping their heads up expecting to see profits arise in the long run. Our analsysts are in agreement, the DRAM market is in serious trouble. We already started to see companies like GeIL thin out, and it probably wont be the last one we see dip off the radar either.
Analyzing the memory market is like pulling teeth; it is just painful. PC2100 decreased another 5% or so while prices were supposedly on the increase, but now prices have corrected themselves back to their original values. Our guess is last months correction was simply delayed as sources dried up. Corsair took the most aggressive reproach to the price hikes and officially cut prices on all the PC2100 products.
Looking at PC2700 is a slightly different story. The PC2700 modules are stuck in the price hikes from last month and prices are generally increasing or staying flat. Since the PC2700 has mirrored what the PC2100 market does for the last 10-12 months, prices are probably leveling out to where they were a month or so ago. Expect PC2700 to climb or stay even for a few more weeks.
PC3200 gets a little more exciting. Prices on PC3200 have climbed a dollar or two here and there, but with the exception of the heavily regulated Crucial and Corsair modules, PC3200 modules are almost 20-30% off last months prices. Mushkin seems the hardest hit, dropping prices to under $90 on its slower timed 512MB lines.
Just to make my job a little more difficult, PC3500 did exactly the opposite PC3200 did. OCZ and GeIL, pretty much the only two companies still pursuing PC3500 (if you consider GeIL doing anything that is), both randomly hiked costs about $10 on all of their modules. OCZ has been extremely aggressive in all of its other pricings, the hike on PC3500 was somewhat unexpected.
Getting back to what is good to buy and what isn’t, PC3200 looks like the only real solution right now. You pay approximately a $10 premium over PC2700, but DDR400 is more forgiving and easier to overclock than the PC2700 solutions. And for those of you who have problematic i875P motherboards, check out Evan’s analysis of 875P and memory from a few months ago. Most companies have produced hardware and firmware fixes for their boards so the timing problems of yore have diminished slightly. Our recommendation this week goes to multiple Mushkin PC3200 512MB or Corsair 256MB sticks for i875/i865 boards (remember to take advantage of dual channel DDR). Since the performance of dual channel DDR isn’t as significant with nForce2, and VIA doesn’t even support dual channel technology, buying single PC3200/PC2700 sticks makes more sense from an AMD perspective. Mushkin’s PC3200 512MB sticks are again a good recommendation.
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